There’s an interesting article about Google in The Economist, which is getting some play in tech.memeorandum. Here’s a taster:

One visitor to the company’s “Googleplex” in Silicon Valley “felt as if I were in the company of missionaries”. A consequence of the theory that Google is aiming to run the world could be that “Google may be less liked in the industry than Microsoft inside 12 months,” says Pip Coburn, a technology analyst. Bloggers have started accusing Google of hubris and arrogance. Paul Saffo at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future says that “Google is a religion posing as a company.”

Or try this: “… ‘they’re trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test’ ~ in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.”

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